Having wrestled medical degrees from an appalled male establishment, the Blackwell sisters went on to found the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children-the first hospital staffed entirely by women-and then added a Women’s Medical College that was more rigorous and progressive in its curriculum than the medical schools they had attended. Moving past the pen-and-ink illustrations of slender ladies with anachronistically modern stethoscopes, I came to know two prickly, complicated women bound together by blood and idealism, not always comfortably. When I began to investigate the Blackwells in earnest, I found them most often in the children’s biography section: Elizabeth, bright and pretty and triumphant Emily mentioned only in a subordinate clause. I only became aware of Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman doctor, and her sister Emily Blackwell, third woman doctor, when I was 44 years old, this despite the fact that I had lived since birth in the city where they practiced, grown up at a proudly feminist girls’ school, and graduated with the intention of pursuing medicine. They’re the ones our heroine consults on the way to her destiny.

Old women are witches-they may embody powerful wisdom, but they are never at the center of the story. Heroines-far more than heroes-are often supposed to look and feel a certain way: pert and peppy but also elegant and effortless, girl-next-door and goddess in one, full of moxie but never shrill. The woman in the photo is likely one of her nieces.

In 1885, Elizabeth Blackwell was 64 years old. Dana, a young photographer on the rise, opened his Sixth Avenue establishment circa 1885. Flip it over, and there’s a flamboyantly curlicued studio advertisement on the back: “Dana’s Photo-portrait Gallery.” Edward C. The original is in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York, catalogued as “possibly Elizabeth Blackwell.” It’s a cabinet card, an albumen print on a postcard-sized rectangle of ivory stock. It’s a lovely photograph, but it’s not Elizabeth Blackwell. This portrait is often misattributed as Elizabeth Blackwell. It makes a better visual than other surviving Blackwell photographs, all of which capture her later in life, less dewy, more dowager. It accompanies articles for Women’s History Month, it illustrates websites dedicated to Blackwell’s achievements, it appears on the cover of at least one biography. If you Google “Elizabeth Blackwell”-the first woman in America to receive a medical degree, in 1849-this image comes up every time. It’s easy to imagine a story for her, a variation on Jo March or Lizzie Bennet: irrepressible intelligence transcending 19th-century constraints. She wears her hair upswept with a cloud of curly fringe, a smart, black-ribbon choker under a lacy, white collar. The image is arresting: a young woman in three-quarter profile, creamy skin, Mona Lisa smile, calm dark eyes.

The doctors blackwell